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If you are a meteorologist, Spring will come as of March 1. If you are an astronomer, Spring will come as of March 20. If you are a baseball fan, Spring comes next Tuesday. And it’s better to be a baseball fan, because summer lasts until November.
This is our last weekend of Winter. Our final Winter Weekend HaloLinks. I could not be happier.
Enjoy these last few editions of Almost-Done-With-Offseason-Links:
A Little Bit of Angels News
“No team in Baseball comes close to the Angels’ track record of developing starting pitching.”. Thus sayeth BaseballAmerica...........
LAA’s first-ever home-opener. Wrigley Field, 1961..........
Shohei Ohtani has the Tempe complex on high security. Fans can’t see him, but other players can. And, apparently, other players are stunned by what they already see.............
Everywhere In Baseball
The Player’s Union will be setting up their own Spring Training camp in Florida for those guys still waiting for a contract that they care to sign. Everybody is invited, although the players on Team Boras will not be in attendance. That’s because Boras already has an established training facility..........Bo Porter will be Pretend Manager. The Union is even giving those players Burger King money...............The location of this camps is here...........
Do you know how hard it would be to hit .400 in the modern era? Impossibly hard even if you melted together the finest skills of the best contact hitters of our age. That Frankenstein monster batter would still only hit .396.........
Fair warning: wear your latex gloves while clicking over to read this Sports Illustrated hagiography of Derek Jeter, brilliant baseball mind on a quest in Miami..........
Venezuela is a bad place these days. Pittsburgh Pirates catcher Elias Diaz has had his mother kidnapped...........
Yasiel Puig managed to get fired. Not by the Dodgers (yet). By his own agency. I wonder what the tax write off is for dumping an asset that was about to make millions of dollars for the agency?..........And it doesn’t look as if there is a long line of replacements scrambling to Puig’s rescue. (I wonder if we could find a way to get HH verified n the MLBPA as a player agency? We could crowd-source his next contract and use the agent split to rid ourselves of the browser ads.)...........
Yeah, It makes sense that the DH had it’s worst season in 2017. For the most part the DH’s last year were a pretty crappy amalgamation of crapness............
Long form: John Dillinger was a huge Cubs fans. I link to this only because of my oldest son, who turned me on to The Hotel Congress in Tucson. Dillinger was arrested there, pretty much by accident. And it is now a totally hip place to go...............
The Rays are to announce that they are moving out of St. Petersburg (the one in Florida, not the one on The Baltic). They are moving into a new stadium in Tampa. Financials to be forthcoming...........
In the Caribbean Series it’s Puerto Rico versus the Dominican Republic. Considering the devastation laid waste to these countries by hurricanes this past storm season, we could not have asked for a more uplifting finale..........
In case you forgot, there still is that Tim Tebow guy out there..........
Baseball is full of tall guys. Baseball is full of fast guys. But did you know that Baseball is full of tall guys who are fast?..........
Hot Stove
J.D. Martinez, using a common Team Boras trick, now tries to corner Boston into panicking by having talks again with the Diamondbacks. Even if this is real and Martinez gets his overpay out of an NL team with no DH, Boston can still sleep easy at night. Rumor is that the Red Sox offered Martinez $110 million over 5 years.........And Martinez is worth it, because...wait...why??? Because his comp is Josh Hamilton and the Hamilton contract and OPS? WTF is that shit? Who volunteers to equate their value to the Hamilton debacle?...........
The Twins are formally in on Darvish. (Well, actually, there are supposedly 4 other teams, too.)...........With Ervin Santana pushed back due to surgery, this might make the Twins a true suitor where a Darvish might fit in well..........
Scott Boras gets a chance to speak to the world via ESPN, and uses it to play, multiple times, his decades-old trick of appealing directly to the vanity of the owners that they might not miss out on this once-in-a-lifetime chance to load up on shiny baubles for their toy sports franchise..........
Boras is getting pretty public now that February is here. This tweet cracks me up. (Ignore the typo where we learn Bud Selig wore nice shoes.) The idea that Boras is pimping Selig as The Great Accommodator dedicated to the principal of all teams winning regardless of how high the payroll for players is ludicrous. It was Selig, of course, who was THE driving force behind the last labor stoppage. And why does Boras know the salaries of MLB employees that he might use that knowledge to take cheap shots? Isn’t this sharing of contract money the kind fo thing that Boras frowns upon when its his players in question? ..........
Josh Donaldson does not care for Jon Heyman making shit up so that he has something to write about..........
The Yankees keep filling up with gritty little ex-Halos. Yesterday it was Shane Robinson.........
The Duffle Bag
Hartford’s MiLB team, The Yard Goats, get themselves a spiffy new Sunday uniform. Love the green!........But for one day in 2018, on August 12, Hartford will play as The Steamed Cheeseburgers. And, yes, I am already on the prowl for the jersey. (Here is a larger story on the event.)...........Working hard to keep pace are my faves, the Fresno Grizzlies. First up are their Coming To America unis............And the Yard Goats then up the ante on Fresno with that Goat Yoga bobblehead. (Inspired by that Marcus Stroman tweet I linked to earlier this week.).........